A taste of history: Native American feasts celebrated the land - includes recipes and glossary

Vegetarian Times, Oct, 1995 by Joyce Dodson Piotrowski

Cherokee, Zuni, Crow, Kiowa, Choctaw, Sioux, Fox, Seneca, Pawnee, Hopi, Creek, Gros Ventre, Kickapoo, Navajo, Blackfoot, Pueblo, Tinglit, Klamath, Wampanoag, Comanche, Winnebago, Menominee, Nez Perce, Apache.

Close your eyes and imagine that you have stepped back 500 years and are having dinner with any of these American Indian tribes. If you can imagine a feast of only buffalo, venison and wild game, you need to know more about the culinary roots of our country. There is an American tradition of a fruit, vegetable, nut and grain-based diet that goes back into prehistory to the Anasazi, Hohokam and Salado of the Southwest and extends to nearly all of the agricultural peoples of the Northeast and the Pacific Northwest.

About 5,000 years ago, corn, squash and beans were domesticated, and in turn domesticated the people who sowed them. When people plant crops, antropologists tell us, they are tied to their fields; they build villages and cease to wander.

The abundance of corn and beans freed people from nomadic hunting and gathering and made it possible to build better homes, make pottery, weave cloth, create art and develop religious ceremonies. Even more important, corn, beans and squash could be dried and stored for long periods, relieving the yearly cycle of winter and spring famine, increasing births and lengthening life.

However, when a community stayed in one place for a long period of time (200 years to 500 years was common), game animals became depleted. So if you dined with those ancient Native American hosts, you would find an abundance of the more plentiful fruits, nuts, vegetables and grains on the table. During seasons when game was scarce, meals would be completely meatless.

New World vegetables, however, were not limited to just corn, beans and squash. More than 400 plants have been identified in the pre-Columbian Native American diet. And while corn was the most widespread of all staples, potatoes, acorns, wild rice and lily bulbs were also important in some areas.

The Cherokee, who lived in the south-eastern woodlands that are now Tennessee, Georgia and the Carolinas, ate game meat when available, but their staple food was a bread made of beans and corn. It provided complete nutrition and was often the only food eaten. They also gathered hickory and other nuts, which they pulverized, shell and all, and shaped into balls that were dried and saved for winter soups and stews.

If your dinner were at Zuni or one of the other pueblos in New Mexico, you would have been served some unusual dishes. Small wild potatoes, boiled young milkweed pods, puffball mushrooms cooked with strong, wild onions and caraway seeds, yucca pods and agave heart pickles, and thick, sweet jam of roasted mescal hearts (see glossary) were all typical fare. Other common foods included sauces made with wild plums, currants or cherries, breads or cakes made with ground pinon nuts, purslane seed, pigweed seed or sunflower seed as wee as one of the 200 or more cornbreads made with vividly colored corn. You also would have been offered a spicy stew made with posole (dried corn), hot chilies, beans and dried squash thickened with ground pumpkin seeds or pinon nuts (see glossary).

But suppose Chat you chose to attend a potlach, or ceremonial feast in Pacific Northwest. You could expect fish of some kind, but you would also dine on fiddle-head ferns, a wealth of berries and starchy lily bulbs called camas. These bulbs were served steamed or roasted, or dried and ground to a powder and made into bread. Fern roots baked in ashes and roasted cattail roots were served with a dressing of fish oil. Soups of dried nuts or acorn were enriched with greens such as watercress, dandelion, wild spinach, wild celery, chives and amaranth (see glossary).

Join the Chippewa of Minnesota for dinner and you would most certainly have been served wild rice (see glossary). You might enjoy it boiled in a birchbark container and combined with herbs and fresh greens or served with dried berries and nuts. You might nibble on popped wild rice or eat it sweetened with maple syrup or berries. Your salad of fresh greens would be dressed with a vinegar made from fermented maple sap. Fresh wild mushrooms might be served simmered with wild onions and thickened with groundnuts, the tuberous root of an edible plant. Stay for breakfast and you might enjoy wild rice and corn cakes with lots of maple syrup.

While many of the above dishes would be difficult for you to make unless you harvest wild foods, the following recipes have been adapted for foraging in gardens, farmers' markets and supermarkets.

Cherokee Kanuchi

Stew with Root

Vegetables

Use hickory nuts if possible, as they provide the most authentic flavor. A mixture of hazelnuts and pecans is a good substitute.

1 cup pecans 1 cup hazelnuts 2 quarts water 2 cups chopped onion 1 lb. carrots, cut into 1 -inch pieces 8 oz. sunchokes (see glossary), scrubbed and sliced into 1/2-inch pieces 1 lb. sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into 1-inch cubes 1 cup canned hominy 2 cups frozen corn 2 cups fresh green beans, cut into 1 -inch pieces Salt and pepper to taste